Azerbaijan Destroys 158,000 Landmines Planted In Karabakh

Warning of minefields in Azerbaijan. (Wikimedia Commons/Voice of America)

JAKARTA - Azerbaijan has disabled more than 158,000 landmines and other unexploded explosives planted by Armenian separatists for three decades of their occupation in Karabakh, according to official figures.

The two former Soviet republics have witnessed decades of war and tension over Karabakh, an internationally recognized mountainous region as part of Azerbaijan, which was illegally captured by ethnic Armenian separatists more than three decades ago.

The Azerbaijan Mine Clearing Agency (ANAMA), in collaboration with Azerbaijan's armed forces, has carried out operations using advanced equipment to find and tame explosives that endanger the lives of innocent people as well as army units stationed in the released Karabakh and surrounding areas.

Since the end of the Second Karabakh War in November 2020, Azerbaijan's authorities have scanned and cleared mines at 162,000 hectares of land in the region, quoted from Daily Sabah Oct. 4.

The amount cleaned consisted of 104,000 unexploded ammunition, more than 33,000 antipersonnel mines and more than 20,000 antitank mines.

Landmines in Karabakh are known to have killed 70 Azerbaijani nationals and injured 309 people since the end of the war.

Landmine planting is a serious violation of international humanitarian law norms and principles, including the 1949 Geneva Convention.

Armenia planted hundreds of thousands of landmines that violated international conventions to defend occupied territories.

The total clearing of mines planted by Armenia in the occupied Azerbaijan region will take nearly 30 years and cost US$25 billion, according to President Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.

After a slow series of negotiations, Azerbaijan deployed troops in September last year and quickly reclaimed Karabakh, whose entire population of nearly 120,000 people returned to Armenia after rejecting Baku's re-integration program.

Baku and Yerevan are currently working on signing a peace agreement, which they say has been 80 percent completed, including setting regional borders, to end decades of row over the enclave, although there are still some obstacles in negotiations, namely transportation routes and constitutional claims.

Last month, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Yerevan was ready to meet Baku's main request for allowing access to transport across Armenian soil to the Nakhchivan enclave, allowing Azerbaijan to connect its territory with Turkey.

"The Armenian Republic is ready to fully ensure the safety of cargo vehicle traffic and people on its territory. That is our wish, our commitment, and we can do it," PM Pashinyan said in remarks that could end decades of conflict.

However, Baku insisted on reaching a peace agreement with Armenia was impossible until Armenia removed from its Constitution problematic references to the country's declaration of independence from the 1991 Soviet Union, which declared the unification of Armenia with Karabakh a national goal.

PM Pashinyan said Armenia had its own problems with the Azerbaijan Constitution, but did not see any obstacles due to the peace agreement "solving the problem."